Hieratic postures,
Vegetable dummies
Modelling the latest
Thing in winter fashions.
Now prospects that were opened
By defoliation
With the close of Autumn
At once shut up again,
Quaintly claustrophobic
As the folded landscape
Painted on a fan.
Pretty as a Xmas
Card, the uninviting,
Uninvited season
Bivouacked outside,
Whether frozen hard and
Fast or snowing solid,
Arrests us in its grip,
Prisoners of Winter
Hostage to the weather,
Glad to stay inside
Away from the forbidding,
Beautiful but frigid
Kingdom of the cold.
In the unenlightened
Interstellar spaces
Glimpsed through telescopic
Windows it is winter,
Eternally nocturnal
Temperatures approaching
A kind of all time low.
Even so, the silence
There is mitigated
Faintly by a whispered
Microcosmic echo
Like an ancient, distant
Memory of life.
